DS SolidWorks leads the way towards eco-friendly products

In today's global market place, being a responsible company is often paramount to success. From shareholders to consumers, everyone is increasingly demanding products that are more environmentally conscious, if not 100% "green." Sharon Toh, General Manager, South Asia Region, Dassault Syst鑝es (DS) SolidWorks Corp., shares with International Metalworking News for Asia how important sustainability in their operations towards the easy way to more environmentally friendly designs. Environment management related issues Sustainable Design is a comprehensive, holistic approach to creating products and systems that are environmentally caring, socially just and economically viable. At DS SolidWorks, we provide tools and technology to help our customer design better products. We know that over 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase. Providing a tool that can assist our customer to design more sustainable products is not only important to DS SolidWorks, but to our customers, our community and to the world.

"Issues like cost, time to market and quality had always been the challenges for companies. These issues are being magnified with increasing cost of material and changing consumers' preferences."

揝olidWorks Sustainability software for the first time makes sustainable design accessible, credible and simple." It helps users determine the carbon footprint, energy consumption, and air/water impacts in a product design's raw material sourcing, manufacture, use and disposal. An assembly visualization tool color-code parts based on their total environmental impact is shown. Configuration support in the software also lets users compare multiple design iterations for sustainability concerns. Issues like cost, time to market and quality had always been the challenges for companies. These issues are being magnified with increasing cost of material and changing consumers' preferences. Today, consumers are demanding for greener products and services. Plus the increasing pressure from the government and NGO to reduce greenhouse gas emission. By partnering with global industry leader in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Experts, we lead the industry with our own package program. SolidWorks Sustainability was developed in collaboration with Germany-based PE INTERNATIONAL and PE Americas, its U.S. division. PE International is the largest and oldest network of sustainability experts in the world. PE International has performed product life cycle assessments for two decades, gathering detailed data about materials and processes to perfect its impact models. To address the environmental concerns of the 21st century, SolidWorks Sustainablility software measures the environmental impact over the lifecycle of the products in terms of four factors: carbon footprint, air acidification, water eutrophication and total energy consumed. A dashboard displays the current value, a baseline comparison of the original design and percent contribution. Since it is done real time, design engineers will be able to easily understand the environmental impact of their design choices, and effortlessly make sustainability a standard part of their design process. If 80% of these factors are being decided during design phase, it will enable the designer in making the right choice. The company desires to help more engineers and future engineers to design better products with SolidWorks. Whether you are an educator, students or researchers, we have developed specific programs and curriculum to meet their unique requirements. SolidWorks is used in Universities, Polytechnics, technical colleges, secondary and primary schools. It offers the best tools for designing products of all kinds梖rom robots to solar-powered vehicles. In April this year, we announced 慐ngineering Stimulus Package?(ESP) for Displaced Workers in the U.Zoom Kobe XII ZK12